


A Tale Not To Be Told

by NammiKisulora



Category: The Mechanisms (Band)
Genre: Angst, Arguing, Blood and Gore, Body Horror, Canon-Typical Suicidal Behaviour, Canon-Typical Violence, Dark, Dismemberment, Drinking, Gen, Graphic Character Death, Hurt No Comfort, Jonny d'Ville also has mummy issues, Jonny has a bad time, Murder, Panic Attacks, Psychological Torture, Temporary Character Death, Torture, Whump, Yes Jonny is a grade A hypocrite, almost at least, but even more issues with the crew being dead, unethical science practices
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-23
Updated: 2021-03-03
Packaged: 2021-03-13 18:21:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 5
Words: 20,280
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29655381
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NammiKisulora/pseuds/NammiKisulora
Summary: This is wrong, every fibre in his body screams at him, they’re not supposed to still be dead, one or two being a bit slow could just be a freak occurrence, but all of them!?Some old...acquaintanceshave decided to take their revenge on the Mechanisms, and for some reason it works. Only Jonny is left alive, and he can only think of one person capable of helping him: Dr Carmilla, whom he'd hoped never to have to see again.
Relationships: Dr. Carmilla & Jonny d'Ville, Jonny d'Ville & The Mechanisms Ensemble
Comments: 88
Kudos: 62





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Does this kind of directly contradict what we canonically know of how their mechanisms work? Well… yes. Do I care? No. I invoke the power of Narrative!
> 
> Thanks to [Anachronistic_Cat ](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anachronistic_Cat) for help with tags and warnings, and to Alderations for reading, encouraging and bouncing ideas with me! Thank you <3
> 
> CWs for this chapter  
> \- Major character death; murder, dismemberment  
> \- Assorted graphic violence & torture  
> \- Gas attacks, suffocation, strangulation  
> \- Blood and gore  
> \- Grief/mourning, panic attacks; bad coping mechanisms including drinking and suicidal behaviour  
> \- References to canon-typical unethical science practices
> 
> This chapter is by far the heaviest on the gore, promise!

Every single one of the Mechanisms (except maybe the Toy Soldier) have had their fair share of nightmares, especially in the beginning of their long, long lives. Whenever they picked up a new crewmember, all of them were prepared to either ignore it or quietly offer their own brand of comfort when they woke screaming from the memories haunting them. After a few centuries, most of the nightmares had usually tapered off, and their general lifestyle has a tendency to desensitize them to all but the most deep set triggers.

For Tim, the one that never went away is gas attacks. So when he leaps up with a panicked cry, knocking over the Monopoly board as he desperately looks around him, the others know something is seriously wrong. They smell the gas only a second later, but by then it’s already too late.

Ashes holds out a few minutes longer than the rest, their mechanical lungs hardier than flesh ones. Not that it’s in any way a mercy when the gas burns their eyes and nose and the inside of their mouth, so in a way it’s a relief when the bullets come. They only catch a glimpse of hurrying figures in bulky gas masks of their foe. The Toy Soldier falls last, when one of the unknown assailants brings an axe down across its head.

The intruders survey the carnage around them as the Aurora’s pumps whir frantically to clear the gas.

*

Jonny wakes up with his lungs on fire and his arms and legs tightly bound together. He’s kneeling by the wall in the game room, a noose hanging loosely around his neck and tied to a grille in the wall. The rest of the crew are lying bound and gagged where they fell, still dead or just groggily waking up. Along the wall, half a dozen figures in dark clothes and gas masks are lined up, their guns pointed at the Mechanisms.

“Who are you?” Jonny snarls. One of their assailants pulls off his gas mask and hood, revealing a shock of white hair and a close-cropped silver beard. Jonny laughs, wincing as it burns in his still sore throat. “The Whisper! The fucking Whisper, here on my ship! Well done, I thought I was done with you back on… whatever the name of that place was.”

“I did my research when you disappeared.”

“So what, you’re going to beat me to a pulp and drop me off at the police station, just like the old days? Except I think the nearest one is a bit far.”

“No.”

“Okay, so you’re going to beat me to a pulp and just leave again?”

“No.”

“Who are your friends then? More people unfortunate enough to cross our path?”

“Exactly.” Another one of the intruders uncovers their face. It’s a middle-aged woman with deep lines around her eyes and a sad set to her mouth, but right now she’s smiling coldly. “It wasn’t difficult to find more of us, once we figured out who you were.”

“Who the fuck are you?”

“You don’t even remember.” Her eyes narrow. “Is that what you always do, travel from place to place, murdering and ripping people’s lives apart without ever stopping to wonder who it was you killed?”

“… yeah, pretty much. Sometimes we sing about it, too.” Jonny tests the knot on the noose, but it’s too well done; all he achieves is that it tightens enough to be truly uncomfortable. He clears his throat and wriggles around in a futile attempt to dislodge it a bit. “So what is your plan then, if you’ve ‘done your research’ you know we’re immortal.”

“Oh, but are you?” The woman smiles and raises her gun, pointing it at Nastya. Without breaking eye contact with Jonny, she fires it, the bullet hitting her square in the heart. Jonny shrugs.

“So? I do that three times a week, and that’s when we’re not fighting.”

“Well then.” The woman nods to the Whisper, who gestures to the rest of the masked people in the room. “You might not remember us, but we sure do remember you. You and her” – she kicks Nastya’s shin – “killed my son.” She turns to her companions, who are tearing off their own masks. “Come on, let’s get to work.”

Silently the intruders begin to unpack their gear, and a faint tendril of trepidation twists in Jonny’s belly. He quickly quashes it; while the next few hours – or days, if they’re determined enough – are shaping up to be unpleasant, they can’t actually do any lasting harm. The rest of the crew are straining against their bonds on the floor, but just like Jonny, they’re too securely bound to actually break free.

He looks around; some of the assailants do look vaguely familiar. Maybe, it’s hard to tell. They’re not even his victims, they’re just… collateral damage, and it’s very rare that he pays any attention to them when he’s had his fun. The Whisper was an exception, and that was honestly not Jonny’s fault, the man was so fucking tenacious it was just easier to let him do his thing than waste time and energy on avoiding him.

But this is different. In the decade or so that’s passed since Brian finally picked him up from that stupid planet, the Whisper has apparently moved on from being satisfied with beating him up to… Jonny swallows as he takes stock of the tools being unpacked, his throat straining painfully against the noose. A power drill, an electric bone saw, pliers, a welding torch… even a fucking portable wood chipper. Okay, they are _not_ in for a fun time, he thinks as the intruders advance on his bound crewmates. But why is he tied up here by the wall while they’re over there? he finally wonders, with an icy shiver down his spine. So fine, standard torture then? But _why_ –

Fortunately, the Whisper always was kind of a talker.

“You murdered our families, so it’s only fair that you will watch yours die, too.” He picks up the drill and looks around him before he advances on Tim.

“Hey, immortal, remember?” Jonny strains against the noose again, only to have it tighten further, his words drowned out by the roar of the drill. “Fucking _rope_ –“

The Whisper goes directly for Tim’s eyes, and his scream as the drill bores into him seems to be the cue the rest of the intruders were waiting for. They all pick up their equipment of choice and get to work, ignoring Jonny entirely. He tries to settle back to enjoy the show, but soon as he realises what is happening, all pretence of enjoyment gives way to a feeling he thought he’d long since left behind. _Fear_. They’re going straight for the crew’s mechanisms; Jonny sees the moment the crew catches on to this, too, and their muffled screams rise in pitch behind the gags.

He shouts and struggles against the noose as one of the intruders cracks open Ashes’ ribcage and tears out their lungs with a wet, ripping sound, their scream abruptly cut off with an unnatural hiss of air. Another one wrenches Raphaella’s wings out of their sockets; Nastya’s reinforced veins and cybernetics are ripped out of her in a shower of quicksilver blood; Marius metal arm is torn from his flesh and tossed away before his throat is cut; the youngest-looking of the assailants holds Ivy up by the hair as she yells and kicks, but her cries are drowned by the whirr of the bone saw as another one saws into her skull before picking her brain apart with pliers and a screwdriver… The Toy Soldier has somehow bitten off its gag, and it’s usually chipper voice is shrill as it’s dragged to the wood chipper by two dark-clad figures.

“You Have Awfully Rude Manners, My Good Fellows! This Is Highly Uncomf-” Its words are cut off by the sound of wood being finely chopped, and Jonny screams, pulling against the noose. It’s nearly cutting off his air supply by now, and his vision begins to swim as Brian kicks and fights the intruder coming at him with a welding torch…

“Oh no, you won’t. You’re going to _watch_ ”, someone growls close to his ear, and suddenly he can breathe again as the noose is loosened. He sucks in air, blood pounding in his ears as Brian starts screaming in earnest as he is torn apart at the metal seams. Then his chest plate is sawed open, revealing the glass tube containing his heart. His screams echo around the game room until the woman whose son Jonny and Nastya killed stamps on the tube, shattering it. All at once, the silence is absolute; all that can be heard is the ragged breathing of the assailants surveying their handiwork. Jonny stares at the carnage.

 _I_ _s this it? Is it over now?_ loops through his mind, and he can’t tell one emotion from another in the jumble coursing through him. A mix of ice cold dread and giddy elation, and something he can’t even name…

“Is it my turn now?” he spits, but his voice cracks as a woman with dark red, grey-streaked hair gives the bone saw a cursory wipe down before shoving it back into its case. The Whisper turns towards him as the others pack up.

“No”, he says, and shoots Jonny in the face.

*

This time, hearing is the first sense to come back. All around him, the Aurora is screaming; the speakers crackle with static, every alarm is blaring, the whir of the fans has turned into a roar, the constant low hum of her engines is now an anguished wail, almost human in its agony. It makes Jonny’s blood run cold again, before he even opens his eyes.

When he does, the first thing he sees in Ashes’ face, their dark brown eyes now dull and unseeing, the twin trickles of blood from their nose and mouth nearly dried. He gasps and scrambles into sitting position, only then realising that his bonds have been cut. The crew is lying like they were before, and none of them show any sign of healing, Jonny sees with a renewed wave of dread. He crawls forward to touch Ashes’ lungs, lying broken and discarded on the floor a few feet away from them.

How long was he out? He has no idea, but Ashes must’ve died a good hour before he did, and thus should be well on their way back to life.

“Hey, wake up!” He picks up the lungs and places them in their gaping chest cavity, but the tube connecting them to what’s left of their airway is shredded, and nothing happens. Jonny moves on, checking his crewmates one by one to see if any of them show the slightest sign of regenerating soon.

The floor is slick with blood and gore, sticky red and silver mingling when he reaches Nastya. It soaks through his trousers as he pushes her onto her back, and his breath hitches when her cracked glasses slide off her face. The Aurora’s grief-stricken wail rises to an ear-splitting pitch, the sound piercing Jonny’s eardrums like a skewer.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck, come on, come on, Nastya, fuck…” He slips in the mercury blood pooled around her as he turns away, the sick twisting in his gut growing by the second. This is _wrong_ , every fibre in his body screams at him, they’re not supposed to still be dead, one or two being a bit slow could just be a freak occurrence, but all of them!?

Tim’s eyes roll away from him as he tries to pick them up, his hands shaking too badly to hold them. The metal plating around his empty eye sockets is torn into twisted, jagged peaks with scorch marks around the edges. The fingers of Marius’ arm twitch as he touches it, but it refuses to connect with the mangled, bloody stump it should be attached to. Jonny rubs at his eyes and fails to swallow the aching lump blocking his throat, his breaths no more than shallow gasps. They’re _dead_ , they’re _dead_ and not regenerating, and he –

He is alone.

There is no way he can actually hear the frantic tick-tick-tick of his heart over the din of the Aurora, but for a moment his vision goes grey as the ticking is all that exists in the universe. He is pulled back from it by a sharp pain in his hand; without noticing, he’s put his hand into the shattered remains of Brian’s heart tube, and the broken glass has bitten deep into his thumb. He stares at the cut as the blood wells up. A scarlet drop falls, landing on Brian’s heart. Jonny picks it up. It’s cold and squishy, the broken metal tubing rattling softly as he holds it, but most of all it’s _still_. The rest of Brian is lying in pieces on the floor, his copper wire hair matted and soaked in blood and machine oil.

Jonny swipes his thumb over the unbeating heart, leaving a smear of blood in its wake. The cut stings, and that’s the final push. With a choked cry, he drops the heart and stumbles to his feet, slipping and falling on his way to the door. The half dried blood is sticky, and the smell of it overwhelms him for the first time in millennia. He gags as he tumbles out the door, kicking it shut behind him before falling to his hands and knees, heaving. The corridor outside the game room is one running along the outer hull, and there is a porthole just a few feet to the left. Outside, empty black stretches out in all directions, only broken up by tiny pinpricks of faraway stars.

 _For space is vast, you are small, it’s black and bitter cold…_ It used to bother him, in the beginning. How endless it was, how he couldn’t grasp the sheer impossible _size_ of it. He’s not sure when it stopped; maybe when Nastya joined the crew, or Ivy. When he wasn’t alone anymore. When he had others like him to fill the void with song and violence and laughter, others that wasn’t – _No_. His mind shies away from that thought.

No, he doesn’t remember when the enormity of space stopped bothering him, but he does remember the first time he asked Ivy how big it actually was. She’d started to rattle off numbers far beyond his comprehension until he physically shut her up with a hand over her mouth, and told her that some things he probably just wasn’t meant to know, that they were better stored in that weird mechanical brain of hers until they needed it. The brain that is currently a mess of torn circuits and shattered microchips, wires and nodes ripped apart and destroyed. The brain that isn’t healing like it should.

He – he needs – he needs to – He clutches his head, trying to block out the Aurora’s screaming, but it’s impossible, it’s too loud, too –

“SHUT UP!” he screams at her. “SHUT UP! I need to think, I need to, fuck, just – just _shut up_!”

The ship goes quiet. Completely, deathly quiet, her flashing lights begin to power down, and soon the only sound that can be heard is Jonny’s ragged breaths. _I need to fix them_ , he thinks, _I need to fix them, I just need to – to repair the_ _ir_ _mechanisms and they’ll_ _be fine, they’ll regenerate and laugh at me for freaking out, and_ – He swallows. He knows where he needs to go, and he will, for _them_ , but it still takes a while before he can bring himself to do it.

He snags a half-full bottle of vodka from the kitchen before making his way downwards, down, deep into the bowels of the ship, to where Carmilla’s workshop sits untouched as she left it. It’s been centuries since he ventured down there, maybe more, but of course he remembers the way; how could he not? From the start, she let him and the others run wild on the rest of the ship, but in the workshop, she reigned supreme. A visit there always meant pain and a very special brand of fear; one that he even now has to wash away with a large mouthful of vodka.

The workshop looks exactly as he remembers it: immaculately clean and orderly, every scalpel in its designated place. He takes a deep breath and starts looking.

It isn’t hard to find the notes; they aren’t hidden, just put away in the filing cabinet, neatly labelled and sorted alphabetically. His eyes pause for a moment on the bulging folder labelled “Jonathan Vangelis”, but grips the bottle tighter and moves on, instead pulling out Nastya’s and Brian’s files to have somewhere to start.

*

Hours later, there are papers spread all over the floor, the bottle is long since empty, and Jonny sits kneeling on the floor with his head in his hands, shaking with strangled sobs. He’s looked through all the fucking files, all the crew’s notes, and he isn’t any closer to fixing them than he was before, because he _doesn’t fucking understand them_. Raphaella would decipher them in a moment, he is sure, but she’s lying in the game room with her wings shredded and her back a bloody mess where their sockets have been gouged out. Brian could probably make sense of them as well, and Nastya might not even need them to get started, but Jonny? Oh no, his crew is fucking _dead_ and he can’t _help them,_ because he always refused to learn a _single fucking thing_ from her, too caught up in his own resentment to imagine a time when he might need the knowledge…

“ _Jonny?_ _C_ _ome_ _down_ _to the lab and assist me.”_

“ _No! Fuck you! I won’t – I won’t help you do this to another one! Never!”_

He throws the bottle across the room and watches it shatter against the wall, the last dregs running down it into the drain in the floor. _Alone_. His thumb throbs when he presses on the cut, but the pain isn’t anywhere near enough to drown out the way his insides are freezing and burning at the same time. _Alone_. He looks towards the filing cabinet, where his file still sits untouched in its drawer. It’s been calling to him the whole time, but he’s resolutely ignored it; he’s not the one who needs fixing after all, but now he gives in and takes it out.

For a minute of two, he just sits with the folder in his lap, debating whether to open it or not. Then he does, and his insides turn to ice. Clipped onto the first page is a photograph of a dead boy, and Jonny touches it with a trembling finger. Can that really be him? It can’t be, surely he was never that young? While it’s true that their mechanisms prevent them from physically ageing, it doesn’t mean that they don’t change. The boy’s face might be the same as the one he sees in the mirror, yet there is something so fundamentally different about him that Jonny can barely recognise it as his own.

He closes the folder again; his vision is too blurry to read a word of it. The realisation of what he needs to do sits heavy in his gut, but he can’t bring himself to admit it just yet.

It takes almost another bottle of whiskey before he can. He breaks into Ashes’ private liquor stash, the one where they keep the fancy booze they don’t let anyone else touch; it’s surprisingly easy, he just smashes the lock with a crowbar he finds in their room. Later, if – _when_ they’re back alive, he’ll happily let them kill him for the transgression, and if not… _W_ _ell, then it_ _doesn’t_ _fucking matters anyway,_ _does it?_ He drains a quarter of it without stopping for breath.

“I’ll get you a new one”, he promises their corpse. “A b-better one.” Then he backs out of the game room again, his teeth chattering. The Aurora has turned the temperature in there down to freezing, and seeing their mangled corpses glittering with frost squeezes his heart like a wrench. He contemplates pulling as much as he can of Brian out of there, but the thought of separating him from his heart is even worse, so he lets him be after covering as much of the tattered metal and wires he can find with a blanket.

Afterwards, he paces the O’Neill ring until his feet ache and his head spins, drinking and punching the walls as he fights the thought crystallising clearer by the second.

He finally admits to himself slumped face down in a stairwell, where his legs finally gave out. The bottle slipped out of his grasp as he fell and shattered on the steps below, spilling the last of the expensive whiskey in a sticky, sharp-edged puddle.

“We need to find her”, he mumbles into the edge of a step, the pain from where it presses into his nose oddly grounding as the stair rocks gently around him. “We need to find the Doc. She’s the only one who can fix them.”

Around him, the Aurora powers back up, the automatic lights suddenly blinding. Jonny winces, and wonders how the fuck he’ll go about chasing down someone he’d dearly hoped he’d never have to see again, when she could be anywhere in the whole of fucking cosmos.

*

Of course he knows how to pilot the Aurora, they all do. Kind of. He knows… the basics. When she chooses to cooperate. Fortunately for him, the Aurora is as eager as he is to find a way to fix the others, so she doesn’t fight him when he plots a course to the nearest inhabited system. With no idea where to start looking, it seems to be as good a place as any; if _she’s_ been there, someone will know, and he will find that person by any means necessary.

He doesn’t sleep much. Every time his treacherous body shuts down from sheer exhaustion, he relives the torture and murder of the others, and wakes sick and screaming after only an hour or two. Afterwards he will spend hours pacing the corridors, closer and closer to the game room, even as he tries not to. The crushing loneliness of the empty ship weighs on him like a physical weight, and his steps echo far too loudly on the metal floors. In the first few days he tried to sing to fill the silence, but it only made him feel the absence of the other more keenly than before.

They still lie where they fell in the game room. After he came back from the workshop, he cut the ropes binding them, but otherwise he hasn’t moved them much. He did sweep the scattered remains of the Toy Soldier together into a pile underneath its twisted clockwork skeleton, though. In a way, it was the Mechanism that put up the most resistance, when the wood chipper choked on its metal insides. But it wasn’t enough to save it, he thinks as he looks at the sad little heap of wood and clockwork, before turning back to blow more smoke into Ashes’ face.

“I’ve stolen all your cigars”, he tells them. “And hidden them, and I won’t tell you where unless you ask me really really nicely.” He kicks them in the stomach, but all he gets is a sore foot from their frozen flesh. “I – fuck, I –” He sniffs and curls in tighter on himself. “I’m going to make you fucking work for it, when you’re alive again.”

Eventually he drifts off there, and gets to have the rare experience of dying in his sleep as his body shuts down from the cold. While the death itself is peaceful, waking up again isn’t any more pleasant than usual. Every joint and muscle is stiff and sore as he crawls out of the freezing room, and his face feels strange and numb. When he touches his cheeks, he finds them covered in a glaze of frozen tears.

Keeping track of time is impossible. The Aurora’s systems appear to be scrambled by grief, and her artificial daylight cycle has become erratic, sometimes breaking down entirely. They stop on planets and space stations, sometimes he even boards passing ships to feel like he’s doing something, but no one he meets has ever heard of Doctor Carmilla. Sometimes he murders them for it, sometimes he just leaves, his steps heavy with defeat. Half the times they land somewhere he’s fairly sure it isn’t where he tried to steer them, but it’s hard to know for sure. He drinks and ransacks both the medbay and Raphaella’s lab for anything to dull the pain with, but nothing helps when even his fucking _breaths_ echo in the empty ship.

“Just wake up”, he pleads with the crew’s corpses. “Just fucking regenerate and we can forget this ever happened, okay? I’ll – I’ll do anything you want, I’ll – I won’t kill any of you for a year, I won’t –” His voice cracks as he squeezes Marius’ stiff flesh hand. “I’ll – I’ll even let you fucking psychoanalyse me without fighting you, I promise, I’ll –”

But neither pleading nor threats have any effect, not even threatening to smash their instruments. Not that he actually would. Probably. Not as long as there is the slightest chance he can fix them. Instead he gently puts Tim’s guitar back in its case and takes it out of the game room, lest the cold damages it permanently. Then he goes to trash the shooting range instead, and when he sits in a pile of rubble with his knuckles bleeding, the smell of gunpowder and scorched wood thick in the air, he aches for them so much he thinks his heart would break if it was flesh.

Then one day – or rather night, according to the Aurora’s unpredictable daylight cycle – there is a ship. Jonny is sprawled sideways in the copilot’s chair (he can’t bring himself to sit in the pilot’s, that’s _Brian’s_ seat, and Brian isn’t – well, Brian _isn’t_ at the moment) when the alert system goes off. He’s floating somewhere between sleep and wakefulness, half-drunk and drowsy, and jerks upright when the lights on the control panels begin to flash and a dozen of alarms beep excitedly at once.

“Ow, fuck, what the fuck, Aurora, ouch –” He rubs at the crick in his neck and blinks, trying to focus on the screen in front of him. Then he sees it: a ship, still distant but well within unaided sight. _The Silvana_ flashes across the screen; the name doesn’t tell him anything, but the Aurora’s excited beeping does. Cold dread settles into his stomach, and for an endless moment he sits as frozen to his chair. She’s there, he knows it, and he needs her, however little he likes it. Finally he rises and goes to prepare himself.

He goes to the game room first.

“Just – just stay put”, he tells them, “I’m getting help.” There is no answer, and he turns away to go and load his gun.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CWs  
> \- Bit o' blood and gore, references to mutilated corpses  
> \- Canon-typical unethical science practices  
> \- Panic attacks

When the Silvana first picked up the distress signal, she thought it must be a mistake. She had programmed the emergency code into the Aurora without any real expectation that it would ever be used; it was only done as a precaution, when she realised her time on the ship was coming to an end. But she couldn’t afford to gamble on it being only a mistake, so she abandoned her set course and instead set the Silvana’s autopilot to track the signal back to its source. When it only grew stronger as the days passed, she both hoped and feared it was the right decision.

And now the Aurora is within sight, her communication systems are flooding the Silvana with garbled joy and grief and fear, and the unease twisting in Carmilla’s gut morphs into true anxiety. Something has clearly happened, and she needs to know _what_. The ships dock together easily, the Aurora pulling the smaller Silvana into her docking bay with barely any input needed from Carmilla. Part of her wants to hurry to the other ship, but she forces herself to wait. She is being… invited, but she can sense how fragile her welcome must be.

She does lower the Silvana’s landing ramp, though, and soon enough there are footsteps; footsteps that falter just inside before they start again, slow and hesitant. Carmilla closes her eyes for a moment and focuses on keeping her breathing steady.

“Y-you have to help them.”

She freezes; she would know that voice anywhere in the universe, no matter the millennia that has passed since she last heard it.

“They’re _dead_ , and you have to _help_ them, you need to _fix_ them.” His voice breaks, and Carmilla finally turns around. _He’s a fucking mess_ , is her first thought, as she takes in his gaunt, pale face and red eyes, surrounded by smeared eyeliner and dried tear tracks. Her second is, _Dead? How?!_

“Jonny”, she says and begins to rise, keeping her movements slow and careful. The gun he’s pointing at her is wavering so wildly that the risk of a shot hitting her is minimal, but being injured would be a bad start of… whatever this is. “Tell me what happened.”

Hesitantly, he lowers the gun.

“They got killed”, he whispers. “They got killed and didn’t wake up.”

*

He hangs back in the door to the game room as she goes to do an initial assessment of the work awaiting her. She kneels by Nastya first, and Jonny shivers when she brushes the stiff, mercury soaked hair out of her face.

“Oh, Nastya”, she murmurs, taking in the ruin of her veins before moving on. Jonny clenches his fists and tries to breathe around the iron fist crushing his chest. Then Carmilla reaches Raphaella, and pauses. “Jonny, who is this?”

“Raph”, he chokes out. “R-raphaella, our science officer.” He wants to – _fuck_ , why does he feel like he needs to justify Raph’s presence of the ship, she’s as much a part of the crew as any of them, she’s certainly been there long enough, and it’s not like she’s the first fucking mad scientist they’ve known!

“Is she now.” Carmilla runs a finger along the edge of a torn-off wing, tracing its metal feathers with a strange expression on her face. “Well, I will have to examine her properly later.”

Jonny’s stomach turns at the words, but he swallows down the bile and clears his throat before pointing at Marius.

“That’s our ship’s doctor, Marius. He joined us at the same time as Raph.”

Carmilla hums and picks up his metal arm, turning in over in her hands. Jonny wants to wrench it from her, scream that they’re not _hers_ , none of them are anymore, but his throat is too tight to make a sound. He turns away instead, and leans his face against the porthole, focusing on the contrast between the cool glass and his heated skin. Then she is finally done, and she comes to join him at the porthole.

“Is the workshop still there?” she asks, voice soft.

“Yeah.”

“Help me move them there, then. Come on.”

And Jonny follows her, his head bowed as they go to fetch the two stretchers from the medbay.

They work in silence as they move the crew from the game room to the workshop. Jonny is careful to keep his distance to her, and Carmilla seems content not to push it, which surprises him more than he’d like to admit. He still half expects her to… he doesn’t even know what he expects, maybe for her to kill him? Considering how their last parting went, it isn’t like he’d blame her for it. Instead she just… gets to work. She directs him with an easy air of command that makes him bristle, but not enough to fight her. He needs her knowledge and skill, he reminds himself. He needs her to fix them, and what comes after, when they’re alive again… well, he’ll deal with that later.

After helping her to undress and clean the bodies, he settles down in a corner to watch her prepare her tools while they wait for the corpses to thaw enough to start working on. He suspiciously tracks her movements as she goes about the workshop, touching things, checking inside seemingly random cupboards and drawers. The sight is both strange and achingly familiar in the worst way possible; part of Jonny wants to run away and stay as far away from her as possible, but a larger part doesn’t dare to leave her alone with the crew. What exactly it is that he’s afraid of isn’t something he can put into words, but it makes him antsy and restless, so he fidgets and pokes at various pieces of scientific equipment within easy reach. For a while, Carmilla pointedly ignores him, but when he knocks over a tray of scalpels and tweezers with a loud clatter, she goes stiff and takes a deep breath. Her back is turned, but he knows that stance very well, from her closed eyes to the pinched lines around her mouth.

“Jonny”, she says, “either be useful, or leave.”

He flinches and waves around the workshop, looking sheepish.

“What do you want me to do? I don’t know anything about this – this _sciencey_ stuff.”

Carmilla rolls her eyes.

“Just follow my instructions and you’ll be fine. But fair enough, you always were more squeamish than her.” She rests her fingertips on Nastya’s cheek for a moment as Jonny sputters.

“Squeamish?!” He stares at her. Of all the things he has been called during his long, long life, that has never been among them. Him, Jonny “I laugh in the face of other people’s death” d’Ville, _squeamish_?! Carmilla holds his gaze without blinking until he looks away, mumbling something unintelligible. She cocks her head and studies him appraisingly.

“I’ll let you know if I actually need any help with them, it’s very likely I might need an assistant later. Are you up for that?”

“Yes”, he mutters. “I’ll do what I need to, just – just as long as you fix them, okay?” His eyes flick up just enough to see her nod.

“Good. Meanwhile, you could get started on reassembling the Toy Soldier.” It’s phrased like a suggestion, but the tone leaves no doubt that it’s an order. Jonny scowls at her.

“How?” He walks over to the box where they’ve put the remains of it, pulling out one of the larger pieces. It’s got half a smile still painted on it. Jonny suppresses a shiver.

“It’s just like a jigsaw puzzle. If it hasn’t changed its habits significantly since I last met it, there should be plenty of good wood glue in its workshop.”

“… yeah. There is. I – I just haven’t done a lot of jigsaws l-lately.”

“Oh?” Carmilla pauses in setting up the mercury synthesiser and looks searchingly at him. “You used to love them.”

Jonny looks at the piece of wood in his hand, then at the rest in the box. It’s true, he did use to love jigsaw puzzles; he always did, ever since he was a child. And… and Carmilla had, too.

“I’ll go get the glue”, he mumbles and hurries off, only slowing his steps on the way back enough to get his breath back before re-entering the workshop.

He starts trying to piece the Toy Soldier back together as Carmilla examines the other Mechanisms more thoroughly. It’s difficult at first, when he tries to keep an eye on her movements at the same time, but soon he is sucked into the challenge of making the larger pieces fit together. For the first time in – is it weeks, months? He doesn’t know – something that isn’t the gaping void in the universe where the crew is supposed to be, captures his full attention, and he blissfully loses himself in it. The Doc is here now, and she’ll fix them, because if she just wanted revenge she would’ve _fucking done something_ _already_ … right? He looks up to find her looking at him, a tiny, sad smile flickering across her mouth.

“Do you remember the moonbeast we picked up on, where was it… Hm, never mind. The seven foot tall 3D one, it took us months to finish”, she says, and Jonny nods, frowning.

“Yeah. Tim blew it up.” It had been an accident, and Tim’s awkward apology had seemed genuine enough afterwards, although he’d also looked ready to sprint off at any moment if Jonny reached for his gun. Jonny hadn’t, though. Instead he’d shouldered past Tim and gone to hide in his room for days, until it wasn’t so hard to avoid thinking about why he suddenly felt so hollow and hurt.

“Oh.”

*

It’s… strange, having her back. For the first few days, Jonny tries to watch her every move, but by the time Carmilla reaches Raphaella, they’ve settled into a kind of uneasy truce. He’s still working on the Toy Soldier, trying to fit together every little wood chip in its proper place – he probably doesn’t succeed entirely, but hopefully it’ll right itself when it’s back on its feet again. The work is demanding enough that it takes a moment or two before Carmilla’s sharp little intake of breath registers as something worthy of his attention, but when he does look up she is standing over Raph with a hungry look on her face. She’s examining the wings’ sockets, turning them over in her hands, occasionally glancing down to Raphaella’s exposed back, where bits of wire still protrude from the mess of her shoulder blades. She appears to feel Jonny’s eyes on her, and look up.

“When this is done, you should tell her to come and find me”, she says. “I think we’d have much to discuss, and I’d love to take a closer look at those wings when they’re a bit more… functional.”

Jonny goes stiff.

“Maybe she’d end up experimenting on you! _She’d_ love to know more about the biology of a – a fucking space vampire!”

“She can try.” Carmilla smiles down at the corpse on the slab in front of her, her pointed teeth gleaming. Jonny barely suppresses a shudder and turns back to the Toy Soldier.

He hates the ease with which she finds herself at home in the workshop, and how – how _comfortable_ she is with her gruesome work. He keeps that thought to himself, though, because he realises how stupid it is; after all, he brought her here for this exact purpose, so to complain about it would be inane at best. But what he hates the most is how her presence makes him feel, the muddle of simmering fear mixed with reassurance and relief. The certainty that she will make them live again, fix their broken mechanisms and bring them back to him is enough to quell any half-arsed impulses to try to shove her out the airlock again, but that doesn’t mean he has to _like_ it.

And then, after a week or so of strained peace where most of their conversation consists of clipped instructions, awkward questions, and grudging answers, Carmilla says it. She’s currently elbow-deep in Ashes’ chest, busy with connecting their flesh airways to the lungs’ metal tubing, and her tone is entirely conversational.

“Jonny, while I’m here, I should take a look at your heart.”

Jonny freezes, his stomach suddenly tight with fear. The traitorous metal lump in his chest aches self-consciously, and he rubs at it, as if a hand could shield it from her if she’s determined enough to – to _take a look at it_. He swallows, his mouth dry.

“ _Jonny, come down to the lab after breakfast. I noticed you sweating and rubbing at your heart earlier, we need to make sure it’s working properly.”_

“ _I –”_

“ _Jonny. Either come along willingly, or I_ will _make you.”_

“N-no, I –”

“Just some routine maintenance, to check it over a bit. It’s been a while.” She still hasn’t raised her eyes from Ashes’ chest cavity, where she continues to poke around with some sharp, pointed instrument. He gulps and looks away again.

“Raph’s been… keeping an eye on things.” His voice comes out strangled, and Carmilla finally looks up, eyes shining with curiosity.

“Oh, then I must take a look! Someone else messing with my work, I do wonder what she’s –“

Jonny bolts. He drops the cogwheel he was trying to fit back into its place and stumbles over the box with still unassembled parts, scattering them over the floor in his hurry to get out. The corridor seems to tilt around him as he staggers through it, the tick-tick-tick of his heart ringing in his ears. He doesn’t care where he’s running, as long as it’s _away, far away, hide, hide, hide_ –

He faceplants into Ivy’s nest of pillows and blankets in the farthest corner of the library. It’s a part of the ship he rarely finds himself in under normal circumstances, but nothing about this is normal anyway, and this is the last place she’d look for him, so it’s for the best. He burrows into the pillow closest to him, drawing in the scent and sense of _Ivy_ ; Ivy as she should be, reclining here for days on end, devouring book after book after book without sleep as he pesters her to come join them for some _real_ fun, but most of the time she just smiles and shakes her head, but sometimes she does and it’s always an extra treat…

He whimpers, trying to breathe through the pillow. His stomach is churning so hard he wonders if he’s going to be sick, and his hands tremble as he clenches them into fists, so tight he must be drawing blood in his palms. The ticking of his heart is so loud, too loud, it hurts, it hurts, it’s _wrong_ – He slams his fist into his chest, trying to _shut it up_ , but it _won’t_ , and he’s choking, he can’t breathe, his heart is aching and its ticking is so _loud_ –

He gasps and chokes a cry into the pillow that still smells of Ivy’s hair. So what if the bloody thing is slowly corroding inside him?! Just fucking let it! Rather that than – than _her_ ever touching it again, cutting into him, tinkering with it… If it stops working one day and he dies, so fucking what, it’s not as if the others are going to miss him, or like he’s a valuable contribution to the crew, because he can’t even _fix them_ when they need him to, not without bringing _her_ here, and he can’t fucking breathe, _fuck_ –

For a long time, he just lies there, curled into a ball and hyperventilating into Ivy’s blankets, wishing it was her he held instead. Or any of them. He misses them more than he’s ever missed anything before, and the hole in the universe where they are supposed to be hurts worse than anything he’s ever experienced, including waking up to find a fucking metal lump had replaced his heart. But they will be fine, because the Doc is working on them right now, he reminds himself. They will be fine, and he’ll move on and try to forget about this… Even as he thinks it, he knows it’s a fool’s hope.

Eventually, he gets up and heads towards the kitchen, mostly because he can’t think of anything better to do. The library spins around him when he rises, and he has to lean on a bookshelf until it passes. When did he last actually eat something? He can’t remember; he has made the occasional kitchen raid since Carmilla arrived, but until now he’s only left the workshop reluctantly. So it only makes sense to find some food when he’s away from it anyway, and he can’t bear the thought of facing her just yet.

But nothing ever fucking works out like he wants it to, does it? On the way there he passes Raphaella’s lab, and there she is, poking around in drawers and cabinets she has no business touching. He comes to a halt in the doorway, and she turns towards the sound.

“Jonny.” She takes a few steps in his direction, her cane clacking on the floor. “Jonny, I –“

He backs away, not stopping until he hits the wall behind him.

“I hate you”, he says, his voice a hoarse rasp. Then, louder: “I still hate you for what you did to us, to _me_! I always will!” He sucks in a ragged breath, and Carmilla cocks her head, looking at him with those eyes that cut straight into his fucking soul.

“And yet here you are, asking me to do the same to them.” She takes a step closer. “You could let them rest, you know. Just tell me, and I will stop.” Her tone is so infuriatingly calm and reasonable, and Jonny crumples to the floor.

“No! No, you can’t, you have to fix them, they have to be alive again!” He looks up at her, pleading, and she nods.

“Then I won’t. Just remember you have done this already, too. To Tim.”

Jonny flinches.

“That’s – that was different, it was Nastya and Brian, they –”

“But at your request, wasn’t it?”

Jonny curls in on himself; he can’t deny it, because he was the one who insisted they hung around in the debris left of Earth’s moon for fucking days, looking for a half-dead soldier floating in a lifepod there… and then, when they found him, ordered the Toy Soldier to pull him onboard and told Nastya to make him better. She’d stared at Tim’s ruined eyes and scorched face, then looked at Jonny like he’d gone insane, but in the end her understanding of the mechanisation process and Brian’s medical knowledge made it work, and Tim woke up again.

“Did a bloody botched job of it, too”, Carmilla adds, and Jonny whimpers. The memory of Tim lying with his head in Ashes’ lap, screaming and clutching his face, is another one that never will leave him entirely.

“ _It hurts, it hurts, it hurts but I can’t cry, it hurts so much, make it stop, please…!”_ _he’_ _d_ _cried, as Ashes held him as he convulsed in pain both physical and emotional, far beyond what any of them were equipped to handle._ _All Jonny could do was watch helplessly, and b_ _eside him, Nastya_ _had_ _clapped a hand over her mouth._

“ _Shit, we forgot the tear ducts!”_

“You hardly let me try to fix him up before you threw me out again, remember? Did you ever ask him how he feels about that?”

“N-no, shut up, shut up, shut up! It’s different, he’s different, shut UP!”

“Look me in the eye, Jonny, and tell me you wish you hadn’t done it.”

Jonny runs again. It’s all he can do, and her words echo in his head all the way to the armoury. Tim’s domain on the ship, where the others are usually welcome, but they all know better than to touch anything in there without his permission. Sometimes Jonny does anyway, of course, but that’s beside the point.

The walls of the armoury are lined with novelty guns from all over the universe, while the more practical ones for their everyday use are neatly put away in labelled cabinets. A locked chest sits in the corner, and Jonny knows he keeps the Earth rifle the Toy Soldier somehow snatched from the destruction of the Moon there, probably along with a few other personal mementoes. The room smells strongly of gunpowder and gun oil, and a huge plasma gun is still laid out in pieces on the workbench. They’d picked it up on a ship they’d boarded only a few weeks before the attack, and Tim was still in the middle of figuring out exactly how it worked when they were captured. Jonny picks up a piece of the handle and brushes his fingers over it. They come away dusty, and he puts it back down, the hollow ache in his chest giving a painful twist. If it wasn’t for the dust, he’d almost expect Tim to come bursting in at any moment, grumbling about Jonny messing with his guns. But he doesn’t, and Jonny sinks down with his back against the workbench and tries to imagine a universe without Tim.

Jonny rarely takes the time to consider what-ifs and paths both taken and untaken retrospectively; in fact, he often goes to considerable lengths trying to avoid it. So forcing himself to imagine a different timeline, one where he let the bright-eyed kid die, the one who squeezed Bertie’s hand and told Jonny they were saving up to see the stars, it’s like putting strain on a muscle long unused.

He thinks of the countless times they’ve breathlessly tried to outrun a fuse deliberately set too short, sometimes succeeding, sometimes failing; he thinks of Tim, his grinning face glowing in the light of an explosion; he thinks of long, lazy weeks in deep space on the Aurora, when they don’t do much else than play boardgames and nap; he thinks of Tim, softly picking out a tune on his guitar in the darkness of the observation deck when neither of them can sleep; he thinks of standing back to back with Tim, ganging up to take down the rest of the crew in the kind of chaotic melee that occasionally breaks out on their ship… and then he thinks of never having had the chance to experience those things, and it _hurts_.

It hurts worse than Tim lying down in the workshop with his eyes still waiting to be reconnected to his optic nerves and refitted into their new metal sockets, because Tim as he is now is going to be okay. Jonny clings to that thought, and pushes away the other one. Any resentment Tim might hold for him, well. Jonny’s got plenty of practice of living with it already, so all that matters is that he gets him back, gets them _all_ back. He takes a deep breath, and tries to shove the thoughts away, instead turning his mind to hunting down something to drink.

The gin cache consists of a few bottles in a gun cabinet. Not Jonny’s favourite by far, but it works well enough in a pinch. He grabs a full bottle and raises it to the fanciest gun, hanging in a place of honour above the workbench.

“Cheers, Tim.”

*

He rubs at his thumb and winces. The angry red ridge of scar tissue is raw from his constant worrying at it, but he can’t stop. The gin is gone, but the painful, hollow twisting inside him is not, and it burns like a smouldering fire he can’t quite reach to quench. _Fuck,_ Ashes would scoff at him for that thought. _Why the fuck would you ever want to quench a fire?_ they’d ask, and pass a pensive finger through the flame of their lighter.

Jonny grinds the heels of his hands into his eyeballs until he’s seeing stars, until the nauseating double image of Ashes as they should be and Ashes as they are, with their chest wide open on Carmilla’s operating table, fade away again. It does however nothing to lessen the feeling of his guts slowly being ripped out of him, the feeling that’s haunted every waking moment since he woke up to find himself alone… He sweeps the pieces of the plasma gun off the workbench with a strangled cry, hoping for a single wild second that the crash will be enough to summon Tim from the dead and send him barrelling through the door, to shove Jonny against the wall with an arm crushing his throat and demand to know what the fuck he thinks he’s doing, and –

His vision is blurry as he shoulders the door open and stalks towards the workshop, fumbling to untangle his pistol from its holster. He – he needs – he has to – He cocks the gun as he draws nearer to the door. It’s ajar, and the warm light shining out of the crack would look welcoming if he didn’t know exactly what lay behind it. He shoves it open and stumbles inside, pistol raised.

She’s sitting in her wheelchair at the desk, taking a break from the more practical work and is instead scribbling something in a notebook. The crash of the door against the wall makes her look up, unfazed by the gun pointing at her.

“Jonny.” She pushes a lever on the wheelchair to back it away from the desk and turn to face him. His finger trembles on the trigger, but she doesn’t even blink. Instead her face goes soft, and she half-raises her arms towards him before letting them fall again, her eyes so sad and _old_ that something breaks inside of him.

He intends to shoot her. He really, really does, but instead the gun clatters to the floor and he stumbles the remaining feet to her. There he falls to his knees, and she catches him as he pitches forward, some dam of emotion he thought long since dry suddenly open. He rests his forehead on her thigh, sobs wracking his body. The edge of her lab coat chafes at his eyebrow, but the sudden overwhelming intensity of touching another living person outweighs it by far. He goes limp against her, and for half a second he feels her hand hovering above his head before she tentatively pushes it into his hair. Her fingers are cold as she combs through it, but impossibly soft and tender where they brush against the back of his neck.

“How can you stand it?” he mumbles through the tears, the words barely audible. “The loneliness, forever?” He tries to draw a hacking breath, but his throat is too tight to do more than gasp. Carmilla tucks his hair behind his ear.

“I can’t.” She strokes his cheek, and he whimpers into her leg. “I never wanted you to be alone, Jonny, I know how much you hate it.” Her other hand starts rubbing his shoulder, kneading at the tension knots there. He wants to wrench away, scream at her, dive for his pistol and shoot her, shoot himself, just – just anything to get away, but instead his hand curls around her trouser leg and grips until it hurts, and he melts into her touch.

“I – I miss them”, he chokes out, “I need them, I need them back alive, I – I can’t – they can’t be dead, they – they –” The rest is lost in a new wave of great, shuddering sobs, and Carmilla continues to stroke his back and pet his hair, while making tiny, shushing noises. _Just like in the early days_ , Jonny thinks with a jolt of – of pain that can only be described as bittersweet.

“I know, I know, I’ll fix them”, she whispers, and Jonny feels himself relax for the first time since the attack. “It’ll be alright, I promise. I love you, you’re my children, I never wanted you to die. I never wanted you to hurt.”

He tries to muster up the strength to call her a liar at that, but instead his eyes are falling shut, lulled by the gentle, steady motions of her hands. The last thing he thinks he feels before he drifts off, but might just as well have imagined, is a soft kiss pressed onto the top of his head, and Carmilla’s quiet murmur:

“Oh, Jonny, I” – a pause, a shaky breath – “oh, _Jonny_.”


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CWs  
> \- nightmare, including blood, gore & dismemeberment  
> \- hangover, nausea  
> \- canon-typical unethical sciencie- and medical practices  
> \- canon-typical disregard of pesky things like life and safety

_Marius screams and_ _struggles_ _desperately against the ropes binding him, but a black-clad, faceless figure puts pressure on the foot planted in the middle of his chest, while another starts hacking at his arm, where flesh and metal meet. His scream turns into a wheezing cough, and Jonny can see the gag is stained red as something in his ribcage snaps with a cracking pop. The assailant_ _attacking his arm brings the axe down a final time before tossing it aside._ _Instead they brace their foot on his shoulde_ _r,_ _grab his metal hand and wrench at it. Marius entire body arches_ _in agony_ _, and his gurgling cry of pain cuts straight into Jonny_ _w_ _here he struggles against the noose, unable to move, to interfere, to stop this happening to them –_

 _Marius’ metal arm_ _comes loose_ _with a sickening_ ritsch _and a spurt of blood._ _His dark eyes are wide with shock as_ _he_ _stare_ _s_ _pleadingly at Jonny, who suddenly realises he isn’t bound at all. He tries to lunge for Marius, pull him away, save him, but he can’t get his legs to move, and_ _can only watch in frozen terror as Marius is pulled up by the hair, and the one who was crushing his chest draws a serrated, wicked-looking blade across his throat._ _Warm droplets of blood splatters over Jonny’s face, and all around him, the crew lie dead or dying, crying out for him to help them, but all he can do is watch and scream…_

He wakes with a shout, drenched in sweat and tangled in the sheets. For a moment he has no idea where he is; all he knows is the terrible wrongness of the universe. Then his mind begins to clear, and he becomes aware of several things. The first is that he is lying in his own bed, for the first time in months. How the fuck Carmilla got him there will remain a mystery until the end of time, but it is undoubtedly the ceiling of his room that’s swimming in an out of focus as he rubs at his gummy eyes and fails to control his panicked breathing. The second is that his head is pounding, and his mouth tastes like cotton balls drenched in rotting corpse fluids. The third are disjointed fragments of Carmilla’s voice, speaking more softly than he’s ever heard before, and the ghost of her fingers in his hair. He rolls over with a groan to bury his face in the pillow, the need to _break something_ warring with the nausea threatening to overwhelm him.

When Jonny finally has the strength to crawl off the bathroom floor without his stomach turning itself inside out, he lurches off to a storage bay on the opposite end of the ship from the lab. When he’s done there, all its contents are reduced to charred, smoking rubble, but the prickling anger and frustration is still coursing through him, along with something hot and tight that he can’t name.

Afterwards he isn’t quite sure what to do with himself. The hangover has faded to a dull throbbing in the back of his skull, but he feels uncomfortable in his own skin, and every time he tries to force himself back down into the workshop, his legs simply lock up and refuse to move until he gives up and goes to shoot something in the other end of the ship instead.

For three days he wanders around, antsy and tense, itching for something to _do_ , when violence for some reason doesn’t help. The thought of the Toy Soldier still lying unfinished where he left it gnaws uneasily at the back of his mind, and every time he thinks of his crew lying down there with Carmilla without him to keep an eye on them, his blood runs cold with fear. But he _can’t_ go back there, not yet, can’t bring himself to face her, not after… He slams his fist into the wall closest to him, over and over again, to stop the thought in its track, and stalks off to hunt some octokittens.

Then, on the morning of the fourth day, the intercoms crackle and Carmilla’s voice reverberates through the ship.

“ _Jonny, I require your assistan_ _ce_ _. Please come down to the lab._ ”

Jonny freezes. He’s poking listlessly at a bowl of something he’d found in the freezer in Raphaella’s lab, and heated up in the hopes of it being poisonous enough to make him feel something else than this dull, prickling ache of _wrongness_ he can’t shake. The pain of his insides melting would be vastly preferable, in Jonny’s opinion. But it just tastes like soggy cardboard, and every spoonful seems to grow in his mouth.

“ _Jonny. I know you can hear me, and I’d really appreciate your help in reattaching Brian’s heart_.”

He gulps and puts down the spoon. Brian’s heart… Nastya was the one who helped with Brian’s initial mechanisation, while he was busy sulking, and – and – It takes him a minute to identify the icy-hot, painful feeling pulsing through him. _Regret_. And he. _Hates_. _It_. Later, he will need to find a whole fucking planet or something to wreck, to exorcise all these awful, awful emotions he has always been able to shove into some deep, tightly locked corner of himself before. But right now, he needs to make sure that he gets Brian back as he should be.

He steels himself, and heads towards the workshop.

*

Fortunately Carmilla can be almost as emotionally constipated as he is when she puts her mind to it, which is one of the few things he has always appreciated about her. So she only looks at him for a moment too long when he slinks inside, trying his best to pretend he’s somewhere else. Then she gestures at Brian, whose body is more or less assembled, except for his chest plate. Most of the wires and gears appear to be in place, except for the ones that he assumes will connect with the actual heart.

The heart itself is lying in a kidney dish next to the operating table, as cold and still as the last time he saw it. He swallows and looks away, trying to focus on the rest of Brian instead, but that feels wrong too. When alive, Brian’s face is far more expressive than any robot has the right to be, and right now it is painfully obvious that whatever it is that makes Brian, well, _Brian_ is missing. But everywhere he fucking looks, there is a dead crew member… _not_ staring back at him.

“Jonny? Are you with me?” Carmilla isn’t quite touching him, and she immediately drops the hand she was reaching towards him when his eyes flick up to her face.

“Yeah”, he mutters.

“Good. I need you to hold his heart while I attach the electrodes. Can you do that?”

“Y-yes.” He clears his throat, angry at how his voice wavers. “Yes! Of course I can, what the fuck –”

“ _Jonny_.”

He shuts up. Brian’s heart is clammy in his hand, and he tries to imagine it’s someone else’s. Then he swears internally, because he hates proving Carmilla right, and he is still sore about being called _squeamish_. _It’s just a heart_ , he thinks. _You’ve seen plenty of hearts._ Eaten _plenty of hearts, so_ stop it _. Soon enough it’ll be back where it belongs and start beating again, and Brian will take one look at you and just… know, and he will never ever let you forget that he has that blackmail material on you, but that doesn’t matter as long as he’s alive again just so you can kill him for being dead at all and –_

“Jonny. Focus.” Carmilla’s voice hits him like the crack of a whip, and he snaps back to reality.

“I…” he mumbles, but she isn’t listening. She’s busy inserting a thin electrode into Brian’s aorta, her eyebrows furrowed in concentration.

“Tilt it up a bit, please. Thank you. And… there we go.”

She keeps fiddling with the heart, attaching electrodes and flexible tubes to it, telling Jonny to move it this way and that until all he can do is bite his lip not to scream. How many fucking things does a single fucking heart need attached to it?! Then he quickly back-pedals on the thought, because a worse one strikes him: what if she _forgets_ something?! Not that he’s ever known her to be sloppy about her science, but what if this one time she does, and Brian comes back wrong, or not at all, or –

“All done.” She holds out her hand for the heart, and he digs the nails of his other hand into his palm as he fights the urge to unceremoniously toss it to her. Instead he gingerly hands it over, careful not to jostle all its new, dangling attachments. Carmilla nods at him and begins to insert it into a new glass tube, and Jonny starts backing away.

He needs to get started on the Toy Soldier again; it’s almost reassembled, only it’s left hip and thigh left to sort out. But without the need to _not fuck up Brian’s heart_ , his hands are now shaking so badly he’s more likely to ruin his already finished work than anything else. On the other hand he isn’t keen on giving her the satisfaction of him going to sulk in the corner again, like he did after she made him help her getting Nastya’s repaired veins back in place. So he sits down beside the box of wooden chips and gears that is once again full of all the non-attached parts of the Toy Soldier. Carmilla must have tidied them up, if only not to trip over them as she moves about the lab, but the thought of her carefully sweeping up the scattered parts still makes him feel… something. He takes a deep breath and picks up the cogwheel that serves as a hip joint, hoping it will ground him a bit.

An indeterminate amount of time later, Carmilla breaks the silence.

“There’s something I’ve been meaning to talk to you about”, she says. “I would have brought it up earlier, but you seemed quite determined to avoid me, and… Well.” She clears her throat, and something in her voice makes a shiver run down Jonny’s spine. He looks up at her, suddenly wary. “They’re almost… ready. But I’ve been thinking, and there are – things I could do, improvements, make them better than –”

He grabs for the closest thing that isn’t the box of TS parts, and hurls it at her. It’s a surgical tray full of scalpels, and one of them grazes her cheek before wedging itself in Brian’s shoulder joint.

“NO!” he yells, lunging for something else to throw at her, anything, just – just fucking _anything_ to _stop her_ – She catches the bottle of disinfectant in the air and glares at him, her eyes blazing with an ice cold rage that makes Jonny want to cower against the wall. He clamps down on the urge and balls his hands into fists, panting. “No! You – you – fuck you, you can’t –”

Her eyes are narrow, and blood is slowly trickling down her chin, darker and thicker than a human’s. She takes a step towards him, and Jonny flinches. She pauses, and he watches her in confusion as she shuts her eyes and takes a few deep breaths. With a strange expression on her face, she touches the blood on her cheek and studies her sticky fingers for a moment before turning her eyes back to him. The anger is gone, replaced with something so pained that he nearly whimpers.

“I’ve learnt so much, Jonny”, she says. “I can do things I couldn’t even dream of then. Nastya could be warm again, and – and Brian could have proper tastebuds. Just imagine it, wouldn’t – wouldn’t that be _good_?” She holds out her hands imploringly, but Jonny shakes his head. His throat is so tight he nearly can’t get the words out.

“No! … yes, it – fuck, you just don’t get it! You never did, you still don’t! It’s – it’s not about _good_ , it’s about –” He rubs angrily at his heart, willing it to stop aching. “It’s not up to you to – to decide to make them ‘better’! It’s not your decision! Nor mine! It’s fucking _theirs_ , and they can’t make that right now! So you leave them the fuck alone, you hear me? Or – or – or I _will_ find a way to kill you, I fucking swear I will, I –” He falters as Carmilla nods, eyes downcast. All of a sudden she almost looks… small, and his anger morphs into something less fierce and more painful.

“Fine.” For a moment she stands still as a statue, seemingly at a loss for what to do now. He’s still fighting to get his breathing back under control when she turns away to yank the scalpel out of Brian’s shoulder, her own hunched in defeat.

*

She walks slowly from cot to cot, stopping for a moment at each of the still bodies upon them. Her work is very nearly done, and that’s just as well, because she is exhausted. This is most likely her last night on the Aurora, and she hopes that Jonny will stay asleep for a few more hours, so that she can say her goodbyes in peace. She glances over to the mattress in the corner, where he’s thrashing about, face contorted in fear and grief as he calls out for someone who isn’t her. For a second, her heart clenches with the urge to comfort him, but she knows he wouldn’t let her. Not again.

So she turns back to the body in front of her, brushing matted, brown hair out of Nastya’s face. Her skin is grey and sunken, but Carmilla can fill in how she looks when she is alive from memory. The first image that comes before her mind’s eye is a painful one: Nastya cowering away from her with her eyes full of fear and hatred. She pushes it away and reaches deeper, and smiles wistfully at the memory of Nastya with her violin, grinning at the ceiling as Aurora blinks her lights in time with the strokes of her bow. Soon enough they will sing together again, but Carmilla doubts she will be there to hear it. She sighs and moves on to Ivy, humming softly under her breath.

It turns out luck is on her side. Jonny sleeps through the rest of the night, giving her time to finish the last touches on the crew. Now their bodies have to finish the re-mechanisation process on their own, and if her estimation isn’t too far off, they should start waking up sometime within the next twelve hours or so. And by then… by then she will be somewhere far away. She has another job to do.

When she returns from the final packing trip to the Silvana, Jonny is waiting for her. He’s ostensibly checking over the Toy Soldier a final time, but she can feel his attention prick up the moment she enters the lab. The silence stretches out, and if they didn’t have so much practice at it, it would feel awkward. At last she breaks it.

“They are going to wake up soon.”

“’Bout fucking time.” The waver in his voice is barely audible, but his shoulders drop a fraction of an inch where he stands bowed over the Toy Soldier. She waits as he draws a breath as to speak a couple of times, but no words come. Then he straightens up and turns to face her. “Are – are you going to stay?”

She freezes, a wild hope fluttering in her chest.

“Do you want me to?” Without thinking, she reaches out for him, only to see him flinch back.

“No!”

“I… no.” She shakes her head, suddenly so tired she can hardly stand. “No.” She turns to leave, and has made it halfway to the door when he speaks again.

“H-how could they do this to them? I – I don’t understand, I didn’t think it could happen!”

Carmilla doesn’t turn around, but the anger, the cold fury that’s been smouldering in her belly since she stepped into the game room and saw what the attackers had done to her children, flares.

“I don’t know”, she says, gripping the handle of her cane so hard it digs into her palm. “I don’t know, but I am going to find out, and make sure that it never happens again.” She doesn’t wait for his reply, but walks away, his eyes burning holes in her back.

As she programs her new course with shaking fingers and stinging eyes, she thinks of the samples sitting in the Silvana’s lab. While much smaller and less well-equipped than her workshop on the Aurora, it’s more than adequate for its purpose – currently to analyse the biological data she has gathered from the game room. The assailants weren’t particularly careful; she’s found hair, blood, and saliva from several people not belonging to the crew, as well as traces of skin under several of the dead Mechanisms’ nails. All in all, she has plenty to go on when she tracks them down, and when she finds them… Oh, they will have plenty of time to regret that it was her and not Jonny who found them, she will make sure of that. For all his violence and blood thirst, he never had the patience for the kind of drawn out, calculated cruelty she intends to use while pulling their secrets out of them.

For a moment, she allows herself to slump over the control panel, a single broken sob escaping from her throat. _Jonny_. She didn’t dare to hope that something between them could be… mended when he found her, but the fact that she was right doesn’t make it hurt any less. The chance that she will ever see him again is – if not entirely non-existent, at least miniscule enough for it not to make a difference. All she can do now is to find the bastards who hurt the crew; it’s the only gift he will accept from her – the only gift she can give any of them, that they might thank her for.

She refuses to look back for a final glimpse of the Aurora.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Your comments mean _so much_ to me, thank you so much, everyone who's read and dropped a comment!!! <3


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> No additional CWs this time, I think. Please tell me if there is anything that should be added!

Jonny watches her leave, her steps slow as she walks away, leaning heavily on her cane. He almost calls after her as she disappears through the workshop door, but it dies in his throat. What would he say? What does he _want_ to say? He doesn’t know. But he can’t ignore the feeling twisting in his gut, something tight and hot and hollow that he can’t identify, and his eyes burn at the corners when he runs to the observation deck to see the Silvana fly away. And just like that, she is gone again.

He goes back to the workshop. What else can he do? He needs to be there when they wake up, after all. When he enters, he can see that things are finally… happening to them. A rainbow sheen is running over Brian’s entire body, as well as Marius’ arm and the base of Raphaella’s wings, and he knows the same must be happening inside the rest of them, too. Only the Toy Soldier lies unchanged on its cot, lumpy and uneven, with excess glue forming knobby clumps and ridges all over its body. Jonny swallows hard at the sight; what if he did it wrong? What if he fucked up, and it won’t… No. He can’t allow himself to think like that. They’ll be fine soon, they’ll all be fine. Carmilla didn’t say anything about it, and he – he trusts her. He chokes a bit at that, but it’s still true. When it comes to this, he trusts her.

For hours he paces the workshop, unable to settle down. Nervous energy is coursing through him, making him jittery and clumsy, and his heart is glitching worse than in centuries, ticking in a nauseating, off-kilter rhythm. He pokes angrily at it, but when he peeks inside his shirt, he sees the same rainbow sheen there as on Brian. In a strange way, that steadies him. If it’s just… _reacting_ to the others’ mechanisms coming back to life, then he can take any amount of discomfort it throws at him.

That doesn’t mean he does it gracefully, though. He is almost in tears from frustration over his own fucking _uselessness_ when Nastya finally takes her first, rattling breath. H e rushes to her side, knocking over a rolling table in the process. Something in his wrist pops with a distinctly unhealthy sound as he catches himself on the floor, but it doesn’t matter, it’ll heal soon enough, all that matters is to _get to her_ –

*

She opens her eyes the moment before Jonny barrels into her. He collapses on top of her, and in the same instant Aurora breaks out in a cacophony of joyous noise. Nastya blinks, her eyes flicking around the room for a moment before giving him a hard shove. He doesn’t budge, continuing to cling to her like an octokitten as he mumbles something inaudible into her sternum. She shoves at him again.

“Why the _fuck_ am I _here_?!” she hisses, and Jonny recoils like she’s hit him. Except Jonny has never recoiled from a punch in his life; his instinctive reaction to violence is to gleefully dive towards it, not… “Jonny?” He’s hunched over at the foot of the cot, his eyes fixed on the floor.

“You were dead”, he whispers, in a broken, strangled voice that scares her nearly as much as the fact that she’s lying in _Carmilla’s fucking lab_ , feeling like she’s been run over by a Cyberian tank. “You were all fucking _dead_ , I – I had to, I – I – I couldn’t, so the Doc, she – I –” His voice breaks with a choked noise, and Nastya tries to raise a hand to rub her eyes. They’re dry and sticky, but she’s too weak to lift her arm. Instead she tries to make sense of the flood of noise and emotion Aurora is emitting, but it’s too much, too garbled for her to understand. _Happiness, happiness, happiness, love, love, love_ is rushing through her as she presses her palm to the wall, but it only makes her even more confused.

“Aurora, why –” She clears her throat; she needs something to drink, quickly, maybe then she’ll be strong enough to crawl out of here and into the nearest vent instead. “Was Carmilla _here_?” She closes her eyes to listen better to her love, and doesn’t notice Jonny slip off the cot as Brian wakes up across the room.

*

He knows this place. This is where he… began, so long ago, after his first frozen death among the stars. But – but why – He closes his eyes against the sharp, bright lights, trying to block out the buzzing sting of electrical shocks running up and down his body, as well as the dull, deep ache in his heart. Flashes of memory begin to emerge: unknown assailants torturing his crewmates, killing them; Jonny, bound and screaming at them; then pain, unspeakable pain as they sawed into him and tore out his heart, and then… nothing, but a nothing that is different from the one he is used to while being dead.

Something collides with his chest with a metallic _bonk_ , and Brian winces as pain shoots through him. The person in process of locking their arms around him goes stiff and pulls back, and Brian blinks up into Jonny’s face. He’s pale and drawn; it looks like it’s been weeks since he either ate or slept properly, his skin has a sickly pallor to it, but the way he almost shyly looks at Brian is perhaps the most unnerving thing of all.

“You look like shit”, he croaks, flinching at the tinny sound of this voice, but the expression flickering over Jonny’s face is one of such fierce relief that it doesn’t matter right now. He tries to reach out to touch his face, but his arm is far too heavy, and he only succeeds in shifting it enough to nudge Jonny’s hand.

“Fuck off”, he says feebly, taking Brian’s hand in his. His lower lip is trembling, and it looks like he’s about to say something more when he’s interrupted by a retching cough from Ashes’ cot, followed by a moan of pain that sets off another coughing fit. Jonny starts at the sound and begins to pull away, but not before Brian brushes his thumb over Jonny’s and frowns.

“Jonny, what’s that?” Brian strokes his thumb again, feeling the ridge that’s never been there before. Jonny goes stiff and tugs his hand back.

“Your stupid heart tube cut me”, he mumbles, tripping over his feet in his hurry to get up as Ivy lets out a thin wail of pain and starts to sob.

*

The first thing Raphaella becomes aware of is the pain. Her back is on fire, and she can’t move. Disoriented and dazed, she tries to flex her wings, and a searing pain knocks the breath out of her in a loud gasp. It feels – it feels – She struggles to put the thought together through the red haze dancing in front of her eyes, and when it finally clicks, she gasps again. _It feels like when I made them part of me._ She wills herself to open her eyes in hope of further clues as to what the fuck is going on.

She’s lying on her stomach on a hard, narrow cot in a room she doesn’t recognise. It smells sharply of various chemicals and is full of scientific equipment, most of which she is familiar with but also a few strange-looking apparatuses her fingers immediately itch to explore. Dotted around the walls of the room are more cots, where her crewmates appear to be waking up in a state similar to her own, going by the cries and whimpers coming from them.

“My eyes, fuck, my eyes, the light, it hurts, fuck, it hurts”, Tim moans from across the room, curled up with his arms over his face. On the cot next to hers, Ivy clutches her head as she retches, her face wet with tears. Beyond her, Marius is cautiously prodding his metal arm, his face contorted with pain as he breathes in small, shallow gasps.

Jonny stands in the middle of the room, rocking slightly on his feet as he frantically looks between his crewmates, his face twisted with some emotion she can’t identify. He looks like he’s either about to cry or throw up, and well, Raphella really hopes he isn’t about to start crying. She moves to rub her face with a shaking hand, but is distracted by a crinkling of paper in her hand. The note is small, just a piece of scrap paper, with a few words scrawled in a precise, slanted hand. Raphaella squints at it, the words swimming in front of her. She blinks a few times, curiosity almost overriding the pain.

 _Aurora knows how to find me,_ _i_ _f any of you ever want to._ _Dr C_ , the simple message reads, and a small thrill runs down Raphaella’s spine. Whether it’s fear or excitement, she isn’t quite sure, but when the implication of the note dawns on her a moment later, her stomach goes cold. The last memories from before waking up are fragmented and hazy, but she definitely remembers being killed. That, combined with the note and the fact that she still has no more than an educated guess on where she actually is, points to something having gone wrong; wrong in a much more severe way than she is used to, and she is used to science experiments going _very_ badly. And then Doctor Carmilla – because _Dr C_ can hardly be anyone else – must have been here.

 _Well, that does go a fair bit to explain why Jonny’s looking like that_ , she thinks muzzily before letting her eyes fall shut again. _Later_. She can think about all of this properly later, when everything has stopped hurting so much.

*

“’S too bright, it hurts, _fuck_ –” Tim’s groan tapers out in a wheezy sob as the lights suddenly grow dim around them, and Jonny’s heart skips another tick, making him gasp. He’s already dizzy from how hard he’s breathing as he takes in the crew’s distress, coming at him from every direction. Helplessly he turns this way and that, trying to think of what to _do_ , how to help them, how to – how to – he’s not any good at this, he can’t –

His knees twitch as he quashes an impulse to just run, but he’s half convinced it wouldn’t help; his legs wouldn’t carry him if he tried. Behind him, Ashes coughs again, a tearing, horrible, hacking sound, with a metallic echo that makes his own lungs ache.

 _You did this. You did this to them, just like she said,_ _look what you did, do something, help them, comfort them, tell them it’s going to be okay –_ A broken sound, half bitter laughter, half sob, rips from his throat at that. Okay?! What the fuck does “okay” even mean!? He digs his nails into his palms, trying to block out the sounds around him. It doesn’t work. Then there is an arm around his shoulder, and he freezes. Who – what – why –

“Jonny, you okay?”

 _Marius_. Marius, with two arms and only a faint scar where his throat was cut to the bone. Marius, who wraps both his flesh and his metal arm around Jonny, tentatively drawing him close, giving Jonny plenty of space to stop him, and that’s wrong, he shouldn’t be the one comforting Jonny, it should be the other way around…

“’M fine”, he tries to say, but all that comes out is a strangled noise that could mean anything, and Jonny gives in. He melts into the embrace, crushing Marius tight to him to feel him breathe, relishing the distinct pressure of a metal hand between his shoulder blades. Then Marius’ breathing abruptly changes into a pained wheeze, and Jonny pulls back to take in his grey-green pallor and the faint sheen of sweat on his face. He barely has time to register the way Marius sags against him before his legs give out entirely, and he pulls Jonny with him as he falls.

Jonny tries to catch them, but they still crash into the metal floor with Marius landing under Jonny with a cry of pain. Jonny quickly scrambles off of him, sitting back on his heels as Marius pants and swears under his breath, clutching his arm with his eyes screwed shut.

“Fuck, fuck, Marius, _shit_ , I – you – I – fuck, you _died_! You died and didn’t wake up, and I couldn’t, fuck, I couldn’t just – just let you be dead, so I had to – she’s the only one who could – Your arm wouldn’t reattach and I couldn’t fix it, so I had to get help and there wasn’t anyone else, I, fuck, I…” He trails off and takes Marius extended flesh hand to pull him up to sitting position, but keeps his eyes on the floor. The ticking of his heart almost drowns out the whimpers around him, and he can feel Marius gaze on him, but doesn’t want to look up to see what he’d find there.

Another metal hand touches his shoulder, and he turns to see Brian arduously getting to his knees behind him.

“What happened?” he asks, his voice still a horrible, tinny mockery of its usual smoothness, but at least he can move about now. Jonny swallows.

“They killed you”, he chokes out, “don’t you remember? They killed you, they _ripped you apart_ and there was blood and oil and metal everywhere, and you were dead and didn’t wake up and I was alone, and I – I – I –” He gasps for breath and doesn’t fight when Brian tugs at him, but lets himself be pulled into his arms. Brian winces as he tucks Jonny tight against his chest, but tightens his grip for a second when Jonny tries to wriggle away, making low, soothing noises deep in his throat. Jonny goes limp against him, and can’t quite suppress a shuddering sob. “I tried to read her notes to fix you, but they didn’t make any sense so I had to find her, I had to, I fucking had to, Brian, I couldn’t – and she didn’t – I thought she’d kill me but she didn’t, and she fixed you, and –”

“Who the fuck gave you the right to bring her back here?” Nastya’s voice is still weak, but Jonny goes rigid and curls in on himself. “You selfish piece of shit, of all the fucking things you’ve ever done –”

“Nastya, don’t. Let’s – let’s talk about this later, okay? When we’ve had a bit of time to… adjust”, Brian says, at the same time as Jonny croaks:

“You were dead, you weren’t _there_ , you don’t get it, I _had to_ , Nas, I couldn’t –”

“Fuck you! I – Just fuck you, Jonny!” She closes her eyes and grunts with the effort of turning to the wall, her shoulders heaving with ragged breaths as she leans her forehead against the wall.

Jonny stays still for a moment, his whole body vibrating with the urge to run, battling with a certainty that without Brian’s steady arms anchoring him, he will dissolve entirely into this awful, awful guilt sweeping through him, because Nastya’s right, she’s fucking right, and he didn’t ask them because he couldn’t, but that’s what _she_ did too, except that was _different_ , but maybe it wasn’t after all, since he hates her for it and Nastya hates him for it, and she’s fucking right to, because he had no right, and –

He feels Brian squeeze him gently, and he’s saying something, but Jonny can’t hear what, his heart is ticking so fucking loudly, and he wants to ask why Brian’s holding him when he must hate him too, but he can’t get the words out because his throat’s too tight and he can’t breathe, and – Then Ashes’ raspy voice breaks through to him, and their words make his blood run cold.

“Jonny? Jonny, what’s wrong with the Toy Soldier?”

In the commotion of the crew coming back to life, he’d forgotten about it completely, but now he turns to look at its cot. It lies motionless, lumpy and misshapen, and still shows no sign of waking up. Jonny swallows, his mouth suddenly dry.

“I – I put it back together, they ran it through a fucking _wood chipper_ , but I rebuilt it and it – it…” But the Toy Soldier isn’t like the rest of them, he realises then, maybe that’s why Carmilla never touched it? Did – did she know she couldn’t fix it, and that’s why she gave the job to him, because it wasn’t worth her time? He disentangles himself from Brian, who lets him go this time, and makes his way to TS’ cot on shaking legs. He shakes it by a wooden shoulder, cringing at the glue marring its usually smooth surface. “TS, come on, wake up! You’re not shredded anymore, and I’ve fixed your clockwork too, but you might want Nastya or Brian to take a look at that when you’re back…” But there is no reaction; the figure in front of him appears to only be a wooden mannequin and nothing more. Jonny sniffles and swears quietly, an icy lump forming in his belly as he stares at it. “TS, I used up all your glue and I know you hate it when we mess with your woodworking stuff! You should hunt me for sport, and you can’t do that from here!”

Brian joins him, his shoulder brushing against Jonny’s.

“TS? Wake up.”

“Hey, TS” – Ashes stops to clear their throat, choking down another cough – “we’re just waiting for you now. You don’t want to be left out, right?”

“Yeah, we’re going to find some ship to raid, and have lots of fun”, Tim butts in, before adding under his breath, “when I can fucking see again.”

“TS, if you don’t wake up after all the fucking work I put into rebuilding you, I’ll – I’ll throw you out the airlock!”

“I’ll smash your favourite teapot, the one you made from ground bone clay, and stabbed me when I tried to borrow it!”

But the Toy Soldier remains lifeless, and Jonny’s hands are going numb. He casts about for something to say, something to make it right, something that will make it sit up and stare at him with its creepy painted eyes and say something weird that only the Toy Soldier would think of… but he comes up blank. The Toy Soldier’s painted smile is a rigid, splintered thing, dry globs of glue dotting the line of its mouth, and all the hours he spent piecing it back together were for nothing, because somehow he did it wrong, and he doesn’t know fucking why, or what, or –

“Since when are all of you this stupid? Just order it already, for fuck’s sake!” Nastya has fought herself into sitting position, and she’s panting with effort as she glares at them. “Toy Soldier, I order you to wake up _right now_!” She falls back onto the cot, her chest heaving. Jonny holds his breath for a moment, then stumbles backwards as the Toy Soldier’s flailing hand strikes him in the face as it sits bolt upright.

“TS?” Brian reaches for it, and it cocks its head with a horrible crunching noise.

“Why Are You All Looking So Dreadfully Gloomy, My Old Chaps?” it asks cheerfully, with only a faint crackle betraying the glue that must be coating the inside of its wooden throat. It looks between them, and the moment its eyes land on Jonny, something in him snaps, and he runs.

*

As soon as they are strong enough to move, they drag themselves out of the bowels of the ship and set up a communal sickbay in the common room. The actual medbay is far too small to fit all of them, and none of them feel quite up to being alone just yet. Only Nastya crawls off into the vents as soon as she can move unassisted, but that doesn’t come as a surprise to anyone. The rest of them lie in the semi-darkness, listening to the others’ breathing and occasional moans and grunts of discomfort, as they try to figure out how to feel about… well, the whole situation.

It doesn’t help that they still aren’t quite sure what exactly the situation is, since none of them have seen neither hide nor hair of Jonny since he crashed through the workshop door and took off at a dead sprint several days before. Nastya has given them the occasional tidbit, but there hasn’t been any sign of her either since yesterday morning when her angry shouts echoed through the vents. The Aurora’s speakers had let out an ear-splitting screech that made Ivy scream before the entire ship temporarily powered down. While the power came back on fairly quickly, Brian can still discern a certain erratic quality in the hum of the engines that hints that they have not yet made up.

He sighs and stops to lean against the wall for a moment. While his robot body has allowed him to get back on his feet faster than most of the others, he still tires far more easily than he is used to, just like the first time he was mechanised. He’s resting against the wall with his eyes closed when he hears footsteps from around the corner. He immediately perks up, because as far as he knows, the entire crew sans Nastya are still in the common room. The steps come closer, and Brian pushes himself upright. The footsteps falter and stop at the sound of his movements, and Brian forces himself to move slowly.

“Jonny?” He steps forward to see around the corner, and there he is, Jonny. He looks – he looks fucking terrible, Brian realises with a jolt, worse than when they first woke up. His hair is standing on end and his eyes are bloodshot and red-rimmed, the dark circles under them deeper than Brian has ever seen them. He stares at Brian for half a second, then he turns and hurries off in the opposite direction. “Jonny!” Brian shouts and tries to run after him, but has to stop after only a few steps, his cooling fans going into overdrive and all his limbs feeling weak and watery.

Back in the common room, he plops down on his mattress and stares at his hands, remembering that raised ridge on scar tissue on Jonny’s thumb. _Your stupid heart tube cut me_ , he’d said. Brian shudders. The thought of being ripped apart like that, and then put back together… it makes him feel sick in a way he shouldn’t even be able to, deep in his metal bones. Behind him, Tim and Marius are bickering loudly, Tim’s whining voice grating in his ears.

“What the fuck _is_ even physical robot eye therapy!? You just made it up!”

“Shut up, it’s totally a thing! Keep doing your exercises!”

“Ugh, fine! Fucking fake doctor.”

“Hey, watch it, Gunpowder! Maybe I’ll start giving you tasks that make them worse!”

Brian lies down and pulls a pillow over his head, trying to block them out. The first thing he’d done, when he had recovered enough from the ordeal of moving from the workshop to the common room to walk again, had been to find a secluded side-room with a screen, and asked the Aurora to tell him what had happened. That he wouldn’t get the full story out of Jonny any time soon had seemed clear, and the ache to _know_ had overridden his common sense, so he’d plugged a fingertip into one of the ship’s ports for a smoother information transfer. Nothing could have prepared him for the wave of pain and grief that flooded him, intense enough to knock him off his feet. Then the screen had lit up and started showing him snippets of the – he swallows, it still feels strange to think the words – time they’d been dead.

The first grainy footage showed Jonny in the game room, frantically trying to wake the crew. Brian saw the moment he flinched and jerked his hand off the floor, where his own mangled remains lay scattered. Jonny stared at his hand for a moment, then reached to pick something off the floor: Brian’s heart, he guessed. The video cut to Jonny, sobbing, crouched on his knees in Carmilla’s workshop, surrounded by paper; then Jonny, shivering as he pulled Brian’s body parts together to cover them with a blanket; Carmilla biting her lip and frowning as she stood bowed over Ivy’s open skull…

Brian had turned away then, and begged the Aurora to stop; he can’t handle seeing it all yet. Eventually he will, he has to, just… just not yet. He hasn’t told any of the others of it, either; both because they are more than capable of figuring it out and asking the Aurora on their own if they only stop to think for a moment, and because some of them – Raphaella is the one who comes first to mind, but he’s sure it goes for others, too – would immediately watch it all, regardless if they’re ready for it. So he hasn’t told them, but the urge to find Jonny and talk to him is growing by the hour, and is not helped in the least by the impression that he is hiding from them.

*

Eventually they begin drifting back to their own rooms, to process things on their own when the most acute physical weakness has passed. The knowledge that this is something they will need to talk about, at length and in depth, sits heavy between them, but none of them quite know how, especially since Jonny is still stubbornly avoiding them. So it’s easier for them not to spend much time together as a group, at least for a little while.

Therefore it’s somewhat of a surprise when Ashes corners Brian the morning after they finally decided it was time to leave the common room and settle back into their usual quarters, right next to Jonny’s.

“Have you talked to Jonny yet?” they ask, frowning. “Or like, seen him?”

“No.” Brian shakes his head, the background worry gnawing at him seeping to the forefront of his mind. “Or yes, I have seen him, a few glimpses here and there, but he’s. Fuck, Ashes, he’s hiding from us and I don’t know _why_.”

“Wouldn’t you want to hide if Nastya’d looked at you like she did at him in the lab?”

“… that’s fair. But I’m not Nastya, you’re not Nastya, and he’s – Why are you asking, by the way? Have _you_ seen him?”

“Well, first off the little shit’s broken into my liquor cabinet _and_ stolen all my cigars, and we are going to have words about that later. But I guess I’m… worried about him? And believe me, those are words I’d never thought would come out of my mouth. It’s just – I heard him screaming last night. Remember that time when he spent a month sleeping in my bed?”

“When he claimed his was infested with octokittens?” Brian can’t help but smile at the memory, and Ashes snorts.

“Yeah. I looked, didn’t find a single one. Anyway, I know what Jonny having nightmares sounds like, and this was definitely it, just way worse. He was screaming loud enough to wake me up, but when I went and knocked on his door, he yelled at me to fuck off, sounding like he was trying really hard not to cry, which was, uh…”

“Unsettling?”

“Yeah. Obviously I tried to go in anyway, but he’d locked the door and threw something at it when he heard the handle. I guess I’m just wondering if we should… do something? Dunno what, though.”

“Me neither.” Brian sighs. “I guess we need to give him time? It – it was really bad for him, Ashes, all of it. I – I think he just needs time.”

“Yeah. I hope so. I want my fucking cigars back.”


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CWs  
> \- another gory nightmare

Brian doesn’t sleep as humans do, but he still keeps a bed in his room; it’s as good a place as any to lie and stare at the ceiling, trying and failing to turn his mind off for a while. He is reclining there when he hears it, the slow, hesitant footsteps outside, and he sits up, listening intently. Just over two weeks have passed since they woke up, and still none of them have caught more than a stray glimpse of Jonny’s back as he rushes off in the opposite direction, but those footsteps… Well, you can’t spend millennia with the same eight people without learning their every noise.

The footsteps stop just outside before moving away, and then back again. Taking care to move quietly, Brian moves over to the door. The steps draw closer again, and Brian throws the door open. It’s late, so the corridor is dimly lit with the Aurora’s nightlights, and Jonny stands swaying and blinking blearily in the sudden light from Brian’s room. Then he tenses and prepares to run again, but Brian is lucky; he overbalances and stumbles when he turns, giving Brian enough time to take two quick steps towards him and snag him by the collar. Jonny struggles for a moment as Brian reels him in, but stops when Brian doesn’t let go and allows himself to be herded inside. Brian nudges him to sit down on the bed, where he slumps, staring at his hands.

“I left you in that sun”, he mumbles at last, words slurred.

“It’s – _what?_ ” Brian stares at him. “Jonny, that’s… that’s…”

“I shouldn’t’ve.” He looks up, eyes red and unfocused, and Brian wonders whatever could possibly have set this off.

“It’s – Jonny, it’s fine, don’t – don’t worry about it.”

“This wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t. I fucked up.”

“Jonny, no.” Brian moves closer, now equally unsettled by what is closer to an apology than anything he’s heard Jonny utter before, as by how wrecked he looks. He sits down next to him, telegraphing his movements clearly not to startle him, but Jonny doesn’t seem to notice. Brian places his hand on his shoulder, feeling the bones there far more distinct than usual. Forgetting to be careful, he skims his hand down over Jonny’s ribcage and is startled by how skinny he is. “When was the last time you ate something? You can’t live on only booze.”

Jonny shrugs.

“Can die on it. Same thing.” He makes no protest when Brian tugs at him, but doesn’t fall into him with his usual dramatic flump either; his only reaction is a small, quiet exhale as his head settles on Brian’s shoulder. “Stop being nice to me”, he mumbles, his muscles stiffening as Brian rubs up and down his arm.

“Nope.” Brian tightens his hold in case he’s going to try to bolt again, but it isn’t necessary. All at once he goes boneless and heavy enough to topple Brian sideways. They land on the mound of pillows that Jonny usually complains are far too soft, and Jonny mutters something into Brian’s shoulder that he can’t make out. “What?”

“You were supposed to kill me, not give me a hug.” He fiddles with the buttons on Brian’s shirt until he gets two of them open and sticks his hand inside, pressing it flat over the point where he can feel the heartbeat strongest through the metal plating. They lie silent for a while, with Jonny’s hand radiating warmth from where it’s resting on Brian’s chest. “’S right now”, he murmurs at last, and a shudder wracks him; then another. Brian holds him close until he stills again, resting his chin on the top of his head and feeling the steady ticking of a mechanical heart against his side.

He thinks Jonny must have fallen asleep when he stirs again.

“The others, uh, how…” He trails off and buries his face in Brian’s shoulder. “How are they doing?” he finally asks, his words muffled in Brian’s shirt. Brian hesitates.

“You still haven’t seen them?” Jonny shakes his head, and Brian curses himself for the stupid question. He knows very well Jonny’s been avoiding the others too, since most of them have commented on it by now. But he stalls, trying to think of what to say. A part of him wants to reassure Jonny that they’re fine, that they’re coping, but… “They’re okay”, he settles for. “They’re all… dealing.”

He doesn’t mention Raphaella’s ever lengthening hours spent in her lab, running test after test of her own or any other willing test subject’s mechanisms; nor how Ivy fights to stay awake until her brain forcibly shuts down; nor how Brian himself often struggles to remember that he is on board the Aurora, warm and surrounded by his family, instead of floating in the endless cold between the stars, the pieces of his body scattered through the cosmos. Maybe Jonny senses it, though, because he suddenly clings harder to him, his body heat seeping through their clothes; a grounding, trembling presence that reminds Brian that he is alive. But it isn’t Brian Jonny is thinking about, apparently.

“And – and Nastya?”

“She keeps mostly to herself, or to Aurora. I think they’ve stopped fighting, though.”

“Did they fight? Why?”

“Ask her. I haven’t talked much to her either.”

“I can’t do that! She…”

“Why? Are you afraid she’ll kill you? That might actually make you feel better, you know.” That earns him a kick in the shin, which he kind of deserves.

“Did the Doc rewire your brain wrong, Drumb-” Jonny cuts himself off with a sharp intake of breath and pulls back from Brian’s side. He gulps, disentangling himself to sit up, pressed tight against the wall. “I – shit. She didn’t. I know she didn’t.” There is the slightest upward lilt at the end, and Brian reaches out to touch him, but Jonny flinches back, taut as a violin string about to snap. “I can’t talk to Nastya because – because she’s fucking _right_ , okay? I’m just a selfish piece of shit, but she wasn’t _there_ , Brian, she – she wasn’t all alone, I couldn’t leave you like that, I – fuck, I would make the same choice again, alright?! I – I couldn’t b-be alone, not like that, not – not – fuck, I –”

This time he doesn’t flinch away from Brian’s hand, but doesn’t relax either, so Brian settles for squeezing his wrist. For a moment, he struggles to form the words he needs to say as stars whirl in front of his eyes, and an unspeakable cold seems to seep into his joints and freeze his tongue.

“I don’t blame you”, he says at last, his voice stiff and tinny. Jonny slumps against him like a puppet with its strings cut. “You know I can’t speak for Nastya, but… try telling her, too. Maybe she’ll understand.”

He thinks Jonny shakes his head, but he isn’t sure. The world is growing fuzzy around him; his still limited energy supply has apparently run dry, and he feels himself unwillingly begin to power down to give his batteries a chance to recharge. But with Jonny’s solid weight against him, the sensation isn’t quite as unsettling as it usually is, so he doesn’t even try to fight it.

When he wakes up again, Jonny is gone.

*

_His steps echo in the empty corridor, drawing him closer and closer to the workshop. He isn’t sure if he’s going willingly or being pulled by some invisible strings; all he knows is that he can’t stop, even if every instinct screams at him to turn and run the other way. Instead he pushes the door open and steps inside._

_Nastya is sitting up on the exam table in the middle of the room, and for half a second, Jonny’s heart soars: she’s alive! Then he registers the state she’s in, the deep gouges in her arms, her thighs, her throat… Shredded veins woven from the finest metal mesh and flesh alike dangle from her wounds, weeping shimmering blood that drips-drips-drips from the tips of her fingers and toes to pool on the floor beneath her. Jonny tries to back away, but now he’s certain that some unseen force is drawing him towards her._

“ _N-nas?”_

 _S_ _he_ _lifts_ _her head,_ _and Jonny’s breath catches in his throat._ _Her lips are chapped_ _and her skin is sunken,_ _her greyish pallor tinged a sickly blue_ _,_ _and her eyes are cold as she looks at him._

“ _You had no right”, she says, quicksilver staining her lips as she speaks. “You should have left us dead, it wasn’t up to you.” She coughs once, a deep, bubbling sound deep in her chest, and more silvery droplets fly from her mouth and trickle down her chin to join the growing puddle on the floor._

“ _I – I couldn’t – Nastya, I – I’m_ sorry _, Nastya, I –”_

“ _I hate you”, she_ _rasps, slumping forwards. He barely catches her, and her weight pulls them both to the floor._ How can she be so heavy _, he wonders,_ with all her blood gone? _It takes all his strength to turn her over, but she only lies limply in his arms, her eyes staring empty and half-open at him as he waits for a breath that doesn’t come…_

Jonny tumbles out of bed, gasping for breath and with bile burning in the back of his throat. He’s already halfway out the door when the first conscious thoughts begin to seep through the icy terror from the dream, but nightmare and reality still blur together as he scrambles for the nearest entry point into the ventilation system. He finds one and blinks a few times, shaking his head to clear it before climbing in. He’s fairly sure he can still find his way to most of Nastya’s old hideouts, but who’s to say she hasn’t found a dozen new ones since he last spent any time with her in there? The ticking of his heart echoes in the narrow space as he crawls on, his vision blurring as the dream images continue to burn behind his eyes. He swipes angrily at them, and his hand comes away wet.

She isn’t in the first few places he looks, and for every old, familiar spot he doesn’t find her in, his chest grows tighter, making it harder and harder to breathe. Some small, logical part of his brain yells at him that she’s fine, that she’s just found somewhere new to be sickeningly lovey with the Aurora in the express hopes of him _not_ finding her. It is however immediately shouted down by the rest, crying out that she might be bleeding out somewhere, that she might’ve found some way to finally reverse the Doc’s work, and Jonny won’t ever get the chance to talk to her again, explain himself… Some distant part of him recognises that if he was thinking more clearly, he’d probably make himself sick with such a disgustingly sappy thought, but at the moment the panic-fuelled adrenaline pulsing through him drowns out everything else.

It feels like he’s been searching for hours when he finally finds her, but it can’t possibly have been that long. She’s curled up in a t-junction close enough to the engine room that she’s sleeping under her coat rather than in it, and his arms almost give out from the relief of seeing her chest rise and fall. He crawls the final feet towards her and pushes the coat out of the way to access her arms, just to check that her veins are safely in place inside her skin. He’s skimming his hands over her wrists in the semi-darkness when she wakes up and slaps his hands away.

“The fuck, wha’ – _Jonny?_ ” she mumbles, muzzy and offended. He sinks back against the wall, letting out a breath he wasn’t aware that he was holding.

“Yeah.” He hesitates, his throat closing up at the way her face is hardening into a sleepy scowl. “It’s fine if you hate me”, he hurries to say, before he loses his nerve entirely. The past few days, ever since Brian told him that he should try talking to her, he’s been putting it off. While fighting with Nastya is a familiar experience, the prospect of doing so with the bone-deep conviction that she is _right_ is very much not, and no scenario that he has been able to conjure up in his head has ended well. But that nightmare… He shudders. Prophetic dreams are much more Brian’s forte, but this one sure felt like a fucking message. Jonny takes a deep breath and presses on, holding up a hand to stop Nastya as she opens her mouth to speak. “It’s fine if you hate me, as long as you’re alive, I don’t care, I’m not fucking sorry, okay?! I – I couldn’t leave you dead, Nastya, wouldn’t you’ve done the same?”

“I wouldn’t have needed fucking Carmilla to do it!” She sits up, glaring at him. Jonny looks away, fiddling with one of his belts.

“I – fuck, Nas, you know me. There was no way I could… _fuck_.” He kicks the wall with a clang, and Nastya rolls her eyes.

“Aurora’s siding with you, you know, fickle bitch that she is.” A nearby fan speeds up to hiss angrily for a moment, but Nastya strokes the wall soothingly and frowns. “She’s… she’s been telling me. Showing me, sometimes. What it was like, telling me I was unfair not to even give you a chance to explain yourself.”

“I – oh.” He risks a glance at her, and the scowl has softened a bit, if not disappeared entirely. “I couldn’t leave you dead”, he says again, because that is all there is to it, really. The ghosts of a hundred imagined conversations flash through his mind, but every different way he tried to phrase it always boiled down to just that, and suddenly there are no other words he can think of. He swallows, fearing that it won’t be enough, but after studying him for a long moment, Nastya sighs and lies back down. The blankets rustle as she gets comfortable, then she lifts the edge of her coat and pats the spot next to her.

“Come on. You look like you could use a bit more sleep.”

“Are – are you sure –”

“ _Yes_ , Jonny, get over here before I change my mind.” She beckons him with a tilt of her head, and Jonny doesn’t need any more prompting than that. He crawls over and settles down next to her, their faces only a foot apart. She’s already closed her eyes, but her breaths are still far too uneven for her to even feign sleep. The silence stretches between them, and Jonny feels his own breath catch as he listens to hers. When Jonny’s almost fallen asleep for real, she finally speaks again. “I don’t hate you.”

He jerks and starts to speak, but she silences him with hand over his mouth.

“No, stop. I don’t hate you, but I don’t think I fucking forgive you either. Not for this. Maybe not ever, but. I don’t hate you.”

“… okay.”

The silence falls again, more comfortable this time. Jonny swallows against the lump in his throat without much success, but Nastya doesn’t resist when he tentatively takes hold of her hand and squeezes lightly. That’s got to count as a victory, right?

When he falls asleep with his fingers laced through hers, it’s the first time he sleeps without nightmares since they were captured.

*

Slowly, life begins to settle back into something resembling normality on the Aurora. Everything they haven’t actually spoken about yet hangs heavy in the air, but the Mechanisms are used to bending their lives around memories they’d rather not touch with a ten foot pole, and they can do it again. For the time being at least, while they regain their bearings and finish healing physically, which all of them agree is taking far too long, just like the first time – another thought few of them are comfortable with dwelling on.

On the other hand, Jonny starts to slowly venture into the more populated areas of the ship again, to everyone’s relief. Sure, he’s quieter and more withdrawn than they’ve ever seen him before, but he’s _there_ , which means that nothing fundamental has changed about the universe. Whether by some rarely shown display of tact, or their own inclination towards emotional repression, none of his crewmates actually comment on his sullen presence to begin with; instead they just quietly incorporate him in their daily life again. When word quietly begins to spread that Jonny has gotten into the habit of quietly slipping into someone’s bed late at night, to lie there and feel them breathe for a few hours, before just as quietly slipping away again – well, most of them have sense enough not to bring up whatever words pass between them during daylight.

But of course it can’t last. Marius is making breakfast this morning; he’s flipping pancakes with increasingly ridiculous flourishes, using a spatula directly attached to his metal hand, when Jonny enters the kitchen. He scowls at the crew’s greetings and plops down in his chair, glaring at the table like it’s personally offended him. Then Marius sets down a plate full of pancakes in front of him and rests his hand on Jonny’s shoulder.

“Um, Jonny? While you’re of course welcome to come and cuddle any time you want, I really do think you should, uh, try to talk about your emotions as well. You’ve obviously got a lot bottled up at the moment, and my couch is alw-”

Jonny’s chair crashes to the floor as he bounces to his feet, his pistol is already drawn. He squeezes the trigger before anyone has time to remind him of the “no murder in the kitchen” rule, and Marius crumples to the floor with a bullet through his eye. While Raphaella’s experiments certainly have involved a few experimental deaths by now, Jonny has so far been almost eerily non-violent since the crew came back. So in a way it’s almost a relief to finally see such a patented _Jonny_ act from him, but then… then the gun clatters to the floor, and Jonny drops with it, a broken whimper tearing from his throat. He crawls towards Marius’ body, suddenly pale as a ghost.

“Marius? Marius!” He shakes him and feels frantically for a pulse that isn’t there, his throat closing up in panic. What if Marius doesn’t wake up? What if, what if, what if – He falls back on his heels, arms wrapped around himself and his hands clenched into tight fists, staring at Marius’ still legs in front of him. A choked exhale is his only reaction when Ashes lays a tentative hand on his shoulder.

“Jonny? Jonny, look at him. He’s healing already, it’s okay. He’s okay.”

Then Marius draws a deep, rattling breath, and Jonny dives forward to faceplant into his chest, clinging to his shirt. Marius blinks in confusion, but wraps one arm around his waist and reaches up to pat his hair with the other.

“The fuck, Jonny”, he croaks. “Just tell me you want a hug next time, okay?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you _so much_ to everyone who's commented and left kudos, you are all amazing and it means the world to me to hear from you!!!
> 
> While this story is over, the Mechanisms themselves still obviously have a lot to process, so there _might_ be a side story or two coming, set in the same timeline! So if you have anything particular you're interested in regarding what happens next, feel free to give me a shout in the comments, on discord or tumblr @[nammikisulora](https://nammikisulora.tumblr.com/)!
> 
> Please tell me if there is anything else I should tag/warn for!
> 
> Kudos and comments are the best <3


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